Arnulf Rainer — Linguaggio del corpo, Biennale di Venezia, 1978

Biennale di Venezia, Austrian presentation.
4-page folded pamphlet / exhibition object.
27 × 21 cm. Offset print on thin wove stock.

Shipping and handling included in the listed price.

Issued for Arnulf Rainer's contribution to the Austrian presentation at the 1978 Venice Biennale, this pamphlet condenses a body of work into a small printed support: self-representations, altered photographic images, body positions, ecstasies, entanglements, death masks. A national-pavilion handout, but also a reduced form of the work's own logic.

The interior reproduces a sequence of Rainer's 1970s photo-based works under Italian headings, while the reverse carries Autorappresentazioni, a compact first-person text on self-image, falsification, psychic intensification, and the instability of identity. The publication does not merely explain the work. It repeats its method in print: selection, reduction, distortion, and remainder.

For The New Rare, the interest lies in the object's double condition. It is both support material and residue: a Biennale pamphlet that survives as a minor document of placement, translation, and national framing. The imposed horizontal fold across the sheet — evidently made after issue, against its intended flat format — interrupts the object's original state but also gives it a second physical history. Not damage alone, but a further inscription of passage.

Condition: good vintage condition with visible handling wear, toning, light creasing, and a strong horizontal fold across the centre from later forced folding. Minor edge wear and soft corner wear. Structurally sound. The fold remains the defining condition note.

Rainer's work of this period moved through overpainting, self-portrait distortion, facial grimace, bodily compression, and photographic intervention. This pamphlet sits close to that moment and retains it in a thin, portable form.